I think every programming language has people using it who are 'worse than average'. There are always people who can do things better, quicker and more elegantly than others. But then again, if you write some little piece of code that does what you want it to do, and it's purpose is rather helping you than being published, then never mind. Hey, the most poorly written HTML-code is usually done by WYSIWYG-applications.

I think, or at least that's the way it was for me, Perl has a bad reputation is because a) if someone who you know is good at confusers says so, then you're likely to believe him without checking it out yourself, and b) because of its use of operators and special characters like regexps where other languages use word-like terms. And what at first put me off as being very complex and mind-boggling I have now come to like as being simple and elegant.

What's more, the guy you met there says he's sick of maintaining badly written code. Well, doesn't that (apart from just badly written code) also imply that most of the code we encounter, be it Perl, be it any other language, is just not commented enough? I myself sometimes find that even though I try to comment my programmes concisely but clearly, after some time I still have to think hard at what exactly the code does. Even more so when it's someone else's code.

So, sometimes it's complicated looking code, maybe together with having been created by someone who didn't think of the most elegant ways to code, which creates and cements a reputation which is entirely unfair to the language. However, as srawls points out, someone who dismisses a whole language because of badly written code is not at all being fair. Any language is difficult if you haven't at least had a look at it. And the fact that it's often people who don't know anything or not much about confusers who make decisions - well, we're used to that, aren't we.

--cs